Tag: The Avengers

Very soon, Infinity War is promising to bring the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) together for one big fight. But do you remember what it was like when the idea of superheroes from several movies teaming up for a crossover event first became a reality? Film critic Matt Singer is currently rewatching all the MCU films and when he got to 2012’s The Avengers, he noticed something in his “What holds up” section:

The final 30 minutes of the film is one enormous multitiered set-piece. Even though The Avengers is the biggest Marvel film to date, I’m not sure its final battle, in and over the streets of New York City, has gotten the full credit its due. It is one of the great sustained pieces of cinematic action of the 21st century, weaving together the activities of six different Marvel heroes (…). You’re lucky if a movie has two or three iconic moments. The Avengers’ Battle of New York sequence has half a dozen all by itself (…).

Singer is right, of course. The “Battle of New York”, as it will be called in-universe after the events of The Avengers, is basically what started Marvel’s whole “third act problem”. While the MCU films that came before it all had characters battling single opponents in the final confrontation of the story, Avengers and its director Joss Whedon raised the stakes and introduced the concept of a group of characters fighting against an army of faceless goons with basically the whole world at risk.

So, why is the Battle of New York still so effective? That is what I want to show today. For the first time in years, I have dusted off my David Bordwell hat and actually analyzed a single cinematic sequence closely, instead of just looking at big picture stuff. I believe the sequence’s success boils down to two things: location and dramatic structure.

Set up the perimeter

Even though the Avengers are fighting for the fate of the world, their radius of action is actually pretty small. About 90 Percent of the Battle of New York take place within four blocks of New York City’s Grand Central Terminal and the MetLife Building, which is where Stark Tower is located in the movies. Instead of spreading the battle war zone across the whole city, Whedon reinforces again and again that it is in everybody’s best interest to contain the fighting to a few square miles to hurt as few civilians as possible. Whether it’s Captain America telling the police to set up a perimeter “all the way back to 39th street” or Iron Man quipping “I’m bringing the party to you”, viewers are constantly reminded that the fight is actually very controlled and centered on the main characters.

This, of course, had a big impact on production. No part of the battle was actually shot in New York. Most of the street scenes with the police and civilians were shot in Cleveland. The production also built part of the viaduct leading from Grand Central Terminal into Park Avenue, where Cap and Black Widow are doing most of the fighting, as a green screen set. But Industrial Light and Magic shot 275,000 images of the actual New York blocks where the fighting was going to take place and stitched them together to recreate the location of the fight in the computer.

What all this ultimately means, is that Whedon is able to situate us quite clearly in space, no matter how chaotic the fight gets, often opting for vertical instead of horizontal axes of action. He reinforces this several times during the sequence with characters turning around and returning to the hub of the battle. The most notable instance, of course, is the long shot that connects all the Avengers and their individual fights into a greater whole. Its trajectory can be precisely placed on a map: it goes up Park Avenue, two blocks down West 42nd Street, almost until the New York Public Library, and then takes a hard right turn to continue up 5th Avenue for another four blocks. This sort of spatial clarity is very rare for a modern blockbuster and it’s a big part of the effectiveness of the sequence.

Dramatic Structure

The problem of many superhero fight sequences, especially those that involve many characters, is that they don’t really evolve. Characters fight, maybe they move from location to location, maybe there is a ticking clock or a maguffin quest that needs to be solved during the fight, but at some point the fight is simply over. For The Avengers, Whedon has famously said that he structured his fight into “five acts, with a prologue” on 15 pages of script so the previz team had something to work with. But this structure also gives the fight an evolution that pulls us along as viewers.

The classic five-act structure, as formulated by Gustav Freytag, divides a drama into five parts that, if you diagram them, form a sort of pyramid shape. The first act (exposition) serves as an introduction to the characters and the situation. The second act (rising action) then sees these characters get deep into a conflict, with the third act (climax) showing this conflict at its peak. Then follows a reversal of what we have learned so far (falling action) with the final act (denouement) resolving the conflict either in a hopeful or tragic way.

When you look closely at the Battle of New York, the stretch between minutes 102 and 130 of the movie’s runtime, it’s actually amazing how easily it falls apart and into this structure.

Prologue

The prologue to the battle starts as soon as the portal opens after Iron Man’s time-buying dialogue scene with Loki. The first Chitauri enter through the portal and wreak havoc. People hide. Loki and Thor fight on top of Stark tower. Finally, the Quinjet crashes on Park Avenue. Now, everyone (except for Bruce Banner) is on the scene.

Exposition

The real threat, the first of the Chitauri Leviathans, is introduced. Loki leaves Stark Tower and joins the Chitauri. Hawkeye, Black Widow and Cap are trying to decide what to do. Cap talks to the police and establishes the conflict (Civilians might get hurt), the location (set up a perimeter to 39th street) and the role of the Avengers in the fight. Bruce Banner finally shows up, hulks out and kills the first Leviathan with a single well-placed punch. It is now clear that the Avengers have a real chance of winning this battle, if they work together. This is reinforced by a triumphant fanfare of the Avengers theme in the score and the iconic shot of the team assembling in a circle (the header image for this post).

Rising Action

“Send the rest”, Loki snarls, and two more Leviathans come through the portal. Cap now lays out precisely what the goal of the upcoming fight is going to be, and which part every character is supposed to play:

Alright, listen up. Until we can close that portal, our priority’s containment. Barton, I want you on that roof, eyes on everything. Call out patterns and strays. Stark, you got the perimeter. Anything gets more than three blocks out, you turn it back or you turn it to ash. (…) Thor, you gotta try and bottleneck that portal. Slow ’em down. You got the lightning. Light the bastards up. You [Black Widow] and me, we stay here on the ground, keep the fighting here. And Hulk? Smash!

As viewers, we now know exactly what we should be looking out for. Moreover, Cap – who cannot fly, is not indestructible and has no other visible powers – has shown us what his role is: he is the leader the Avengers need if they want to work as a team. With the individual goals set, we see a few successful fights as the battle gets underway, but Cap ultimately has to see that his plan won’t work in the long run. Together with Black Widow, he redefines the goal: the portal must be closed. Black Widow takes off.

Climax

At this point of the battle, we get to see our heroes winning. It starts with the long shot mentioned earlier that shows the Avengers working together like a well-oiled machine. It also has the most moments of levity, with Hulk both punching Thor out of frame after they brought down another Leviathan and later giving Loki the headache of a lifetime in the “puny god” scene.

What’s more, Cap finally gets to rescue some civilians from a bank, like he wanted to do the whole time. And Erik Selvig finally wakes up and tells Natasha that he should be able to close the portal. “You know what?”, we’re saying to ourselves, “this might just work!”

Falling Action

Even Avengers have limited stamina. A series of shots shows the toll the battle is taking on our heroes. Iron Man crashes. Hawkeye is out of arrows and has to hide in a building. Hulk is under a constant fire from the Chitauri he can’t escape. Even Cap gets hit. But Whedon really turns the tables by introducing an outside threat nobody saw coming. Nick Fury’s council of secret world leaders wants to nuke New York and nobody can stop them. Not even Fury himself, not even with a bazooka. Now, the Avengers are in a bind. They might close the portal, but that won’t save Manhattan from nuclear destruction. What are they going to do?

Denouement

In the final act of the Battle of New York, the film recenters the fight on the action of one person. Tony Stark, who has been accused of only thinking about himself most of the time, gets the chance to redeem himself through sacrifice. He catches the missile and transports it into the portal with everyone watching. The nuke explodes and conveniently kills all the Chitauri, who don’t seem to possess a will of their own. Now, Black Widow can close the portal. Tony falls, gets caught by the Hulk and lands on the exact same spot the fight started. “We won.” The final beat shows Loki waking up with the Avengers towering over him. Only after this does the film move on to the actual aftermath of the battle.

In Conclusion

Notice how every act slightly shifts the goal of the overall fight. At first, it’s just the Leviathan, then it’s the containment of the battle, then it’s the closing of the portal, and finally it’s getting rid of the nuke, which also serves to end the fight as a whole. Every Avenger gets their chance to shine during this, whether it’s Hawkeye picking off Chitauri chasing Iron Man or Thor calling down lightning to the Chrysler building. However, the metanarrative, which is also the metanarrative of the whole film, stays the same throughout: Avengers. Together. Strong.

Tying all of these qualities together is something that many other superhero battles lack. The airport fight in Civil War is contained to one (rather boring) location and it twists and turns dramatically, but while it should be telling the story of the film in miniature (two factions of superheroes believing in different solutions to the same problem), it is hard to tell who is on which side and why. The final fight scene in Black Panther reinforces the central conflict between T’Challa and Killmonger, but it has to give everyone else something to do as well, so it spreads out the battle to several different locations and several distinct personal conflicts.

When we look to Infinity War, we can at least see that we have a central promising villain in Thanos. There is also a good chance that the metaplot will be similar to the one in The Avengers – heroes have to put aside their differences to vanquish a foe that’s more powerful than each of their factions. But already the trailer and title hint at an actual war, which means a battle fought simultaneously on several geographically separate fronts. So maybe, we will never get another Battle of New York. But now at least we know how it’s done.

the fun part of that, if you are a comic book geek like me, you get off on [easter eggs and connections]. That’s the exciting component of that, “What can we set up for the future?” And they’re constantly pitching out ideas that not only just effects your movie, but might also have a ripple effect in the other films, and Joss [Whedon] is reading the scripts, the Thor script and the Cap script, and going, “Okay, this is where I’m getting the characters and this is where I have to pick them up in the next movie.” So, it’s a a weird sort of, I don’t know, tapestry of writers and directors working together to create this universe. It’s sort of organic, it’s not structured.

I think it comes very natural to us […], we played with a lot of foreshadowing and callbacks and […] tracking that stuff over a season of television, or multiple seasons, it’s just something [that] we’re sort of patterned for […] It’s like we sort of understand how you take a larger story and wrangle it into a moment, yet keep them connected.

If you knew how difficult it is to line up those kinds of salaries, stars, get that material pushed through, have ownership of that material, have control of that material, quality control, to the extent that he did, it’s almost impossible.

[T]he studio is not involved in the day-to-day of the show. Jeph Loeb and the TV division is overseeing that. But of course there’s crossover. I was just in a meeting with those guys and I’m about in two minutes to go back to a meeting with those guys to hear the overall picture and to, you know, to hear their ideas and how they deal with the events and Thor and the events of the Cap. Their ideas for season two, should there be one, to make sure they lead into Avengers and don’t … the key to that show, just like they key to all the movies is that, it has to stand alone. It has – if you stripped out all the connective tissue, is it worth watching? And it has to be – and then it’s all bonus and it’s all gravy when there’s that connective tissue.

Andrew Stanton’s latest film John Carter is the talk of the town. It cost somewhere between $250 and $300 Million and it didn’t actually make that much money on the opening weekend – at least in the U.S. There is hope that it might become a slow grower and eventually make back its budget, but in the industry’s eye, it can be considered a flop. Many critics also didn’t like it. They felt it was all over the place storywise, campy and simply not interesting enough.

The film’s opening weekend controversy, to use a big word, got me thinking. Thinking that maybe forgiveness is the only way to deal with films like John Carter, that it should be the sentiment with which we enter the theatre and which we should dial up when we review the films in our heads later on. Why? Because a film of the John Carter kind will never ever please us, if we’re not prepared to forgive.

First of all, what do I mean by “the John Carter kind”? I’m talking about films that come with attached baggage from three sources: 1. expectations from those that know and love the source material; 2. expectations toward a director with a certain credibility or track record; and 3. hype generated by the singularity and finality of the event, supported by marketing.

The three criteria are certainly true of John Carter. Many people love the source material, they have read the books as teenagers (I haven’t). Andrew Stanton is a respected director, who created Finding Nemo and Wall-E, among the more unconventional Pixar-Films (and two of its Oscar winners). And the long list of trials of bringing John Carter to the screen for twenty and more years certainly also made the fact that it finally happened very momentous.

So with all that expectation (and the amounts of money mentioned in connection with the movie), could John Carter do anything else than fail? Yes. It could have been a Lord of the Rings, a Dark Knight or an Avatar, tentpole films of the last ten years that somehow managed to meet the expectations set in them, were lauded by critics and audiences alike – despite obvious weaknesses.

But what if we forget about the expectation and the money for a moment? What if we forgive Andrew Stanton his major error of trying to tackle a property that is clearly something that you might enjoy as a child but raise your eyebrows at, when you’re an adult. In all seriousness: John Carter is not a bad movie by a long stretch. It’s heaps of illogical fun with charismatic leads. It builds a rich world that for all its preposterousness feels somehow believable. And it sustains several mysteries for much of its running time. People were willing to forgive Avatar its cheesy exoticism and enviromentalism (and possible racism). They were willing to forgive The Return of the King its many endings and endless battle scenes. I am willing to forgive John Carter its convoluted story and superficial worldview – and just enjoy the movie.

And I hope that forgiveness will be on my mind, when The Avengersroll around soon.

When the first trailer for The Avengers hit the net on Tuesday, I tweeted something which has been on my mind for a few days now: I haven’t been this excited about a film and followed every step of its development since The Lord of the Rings, ten years ago. My exclamation met with incredulity from my fellow film buff friend Carsten: “I don’t get it”, he wrote. “Looks totally generic.” And I couldn’t help but tell him, he’s right.

I think “Cinemablend”‘s last reason is key here, and it ties in with Erin’s Tweet. If The Avengers will really only be a sort of Tony Stark show with a couple of other guys in the background, then it will become another generic comic book movie, maybe even a comic book movie that suffers from the extra plot stuffed in for franchise reasons like Iron Man 2. And the trailer doesn’t do much to ward off that sentiment.

Nevermind that the movie turned out to be terrible, but do you remember the first teaser trailer for The Phantom Menace? It did have that “Every saga has a beginning …”-feel to it. It had Anakin Skywalker meeting Obi-Wan for the first time, it had the moment where Darth Maul unveils his double-bladed lightsaber. It definitely got me excited. The first teaser for The Fellowship of the Ring said “It wasn’t until now that the legend could finally come to life!” – even more excitement there. The Avengers trailer doesn’t even say “Avengers assemble!”. The teaser at the end of Captain America did a much better job at making this exceptional movie project actually look exceptional (not least because of the “Some Assembly Required” tagline).

The question stands: Will The Avengers, the movie itself, not the effort that went into building up the project, actually be exceptional? Something the trailer pulled into question for me is: Does Marvel see this film as a culmination? A finale of sorts to the five movies that preceded it? Or will it be just a continuation of the universe they are building? If people keep expecting the former and the movie turns out to be the latter, with too many loose ends, not at least some sense of closure and no general feeling of Big Momentness – it will definitely disappoint a lot of people.

I don’t read comic books continually and generally haven’t followed any periodical narrative regularly for some time now (I only watch tv series on DVD sets), but what Marvel has been trying to do with the building of their universe and the creation of their franchises is basically to import comic book narrative mechanics into the movie world. The first Avengers book was a decisive narrative moment in time, because it brought together heroes that hadn’t worked together before, but it was no culmination, it was a beginning – and it ultimately did feel quite generic to me when I caught up with reading it recently. In one of the last panels, one of the characters says something to the effect of “A team of superheroes, huh? We could give it a try.” Not really very momentous.

If Joss Whedon knows what he’s doing, like I hope he does, he will not make this look like Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Cap and the rest of them are merely giving it a try. He will make this The Moment We’ve All Been Waiting For(tm), when the heroes of five movies finally assemble. And then, The Avengers will be exceptional – and not as generic as its first trailer.

At the end of my podcast with Kirsten Dietrich about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a topic of discussion came up that I would like to mull about a bit longer in this post. We talked about whether the Harry Potter movies, even if they are maybe not the best possible translation of the books into moving pictures (I still think that a TV series might have made for a better, if more expensive, adaptation), have become the definitive visual representation of the seven novels, not least because the author J. K. Rowling was very involved in the production and casting from the very beginning.

Translations from one medium into another usually involve several changes in the ur-text to fit and, indeed, adapt it to the new medium. In this way, they generally create a new universe related to but not congruent to the universe of the ur-text. In one of the videos on the Extended Edition of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, the screenwriters and some Tolkien experts broach this topic when they talk about adapting Tolkien’s novel. I think it is Brian Sibley who points out that, in the future, there will be two important Rings texts: Tolkien and Tolkien as interpreted by Jackson.1

In the case of Harry Potter, because the author was so heavily involved in the adaptation process, the two universes are almost alike. The films, although they differ from the books in some ways, have almost become part of the Harry Potter canon (and indeed are seen this way by the fans of the HP universe) and have succeeded in creating the definitive visual representations of characters and some events in the books because they have Rowling’s seal of approval. This has even been enforced legally, as Kirsten points out in the podcast. When Sabine Wilharm, the illustrator who created the covers for the Harry Potter books in Germany, created additional paintings that show other scenes from the books, Warner Bros. sued the commissioning publisher. The same brute force has been applied to creators of fan sites.

Ownership of and control over an intellectual property is the foundation of succesful franchising. While it does goes to silly extremes sometimes (as mentioned above), it’s a key ingredient to make the franchise work and fit together. For the process of adapting source material into film while controlling that source material at the same time (as Rowling did), this still seems to me to be a relatively new mainstream concept that I would trace back to the creation of Marvel Studios in 1996. I’ve read enough “development hell” stories to believe that adaptations, for example of comics, used to be handled differently. The IP owner would sell their license and the studio would go and adapt it, sometimes screwing up, sometimes not, but always with very little input from the IP’s originators.

The early films produced with Marvel Studios in tow, such as Sam Raimis Spider-Man films and Bryan Singers X-Men films, already had a certain amount of faithfulness to the source material “in spirit” that earlier incarnations had not achieved (or so, I gather, fans believe), similar to Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkien. By setting up the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), however, the former comic book publisher has added another layer to the cake: harnessing the process of filmmaking, which involves hundreds of people in contrast to the few involved in creating a comic book, to produce a number of films that tie in to create one cinematic universe that, while not corresponding one-on-one to its source material, is canonic in its own right. In effect, they too are creating definitive cinematic versions of their comic book characters.

I have already expressed my admiration for the Avengers film, the first culmination of the MCU, in this blog one year ago and there is nothing more illuminating about the process than this quote by Marvel president Kevin Feige:

It’s never been done before and that’s kind of the spirit everybody’s taking it in. The other filmmakers aren’t used to getting actors from other movies that other filmmakers have cast, certain plot lines that are connected or certain locations that are connected but I think for the most part, in fact, entirely everyone was on board for it and thinks that its fun. Primarily because we’ve always remained consistent saying that the movie that we are making comes first. All of the connective tissue, all of that stuff is fun and is going to be very important if you want it to be. (Source)

The result might be thought of as a slap in the face to the individual artistic expression of any one director but it’s very effective. Marvel are applying to movies what has been general practice in TV series for ages, even more so since the advent of complicated series with multiple narrative strands such as The X-Files or Lost. They are continuing down this route, rebootingSpider-Man (as they already did with The Incredible Hulk) and, in effect, X-Men to integrate them into their grand scheme. And DC, with their umpteenth version of Superman (Man of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder) and, probably, Batman in the works, are hard on their heels.

The difference to a TV series, of course, is that there is no real linear plot to the MCU. While the films leading up to The Avengers share a certain timeline, each narrative strand also stands on its own with just a few nods to its sister narratives. If the actors are willing to participate, the films allow for endless tangents and intersections while they, at the same time, stay locked together in one unified and definitive worldtrack2 controlled by Marvel.3

This article only summarises some of the things I have been thinking about lately. I have probably forgotten important ideas and misinterpreted others. I would be very happy to discuss the thoughts sketched out above in more detail with readers of this article. Head to the comments!

1 Jackson very cleverly mediated between his version of Tolkien and the visual interpretations that had come before him by enlisting John Howe and Alan Lee as concept artists. In this way, there is no real “break” between how many fans had always imagined Middle-Earth to look like, including cover illustrations etc. into their imaginations (as one does), and how it looked like in the film. ^2 I have just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s novel “Anathem” and borrowed this word from the book. ^3 A multi-faceted adaptation of Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series with Ron Howard at the helm that, in its concept, shares some ideas with something like the MCU has, unfortunately, just been canned. ^